'Next to Normal' at the Beck Center sings with Baldwin Wallace talent

From left, Chris McCarrell (Gabe), Katherine DeBoer (Diana) and Scott Plate (Dan) in "Next to Normal," now onstage at the Beck Center for the Arts.Ben Meadors

REVIEW

Next to Normal

What: The Beck Center for the Arts, in collaboration with Baldwin Wallace University music theater program, presents the rock musical about a family's struggle with mental illness. Music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey. Directed by Victoria Bussert. Musical direction by Nancy Maier. Choreography by David Zody.

When: Through Sunday, April 21.

Where: The Beck's Studio Theatre, 17801 Detroit Ave., Cleveland.

Tickets: $15-$28. Go to beckcenter.org or call 216-521-2540.

It takes a moment to realize it, but the suburban home of a set dominating the Beck Center's Studio Theatre in "Next to Normal" is constructed entirely of empty prescription pill bottles, topped with a wooden red roof.

But then, this is the Tony Award-winning rock musical about a family grappling with mental illness, the deceptively simple architecture by production designer Jeff Herrmann a stark reminder of the pharmacological nightmare being lived by Diana (Katherine DeBoer), the lady of the house.

Through two intense acts -- made even more so by the choice to stage the show in the smaller, more intimate of the Beck's two theaters -- those bottles of uppers and downers and anti-psychotics glow yellow or orange or red, taking on the look of circuitry inside a computer -- or the wiring in Diana's febrile brain.

As the play opens, she is experiencing what any armchair psychiatrist would recognize as a manic phase. Awake before dawn, she waits for her teenage son (Chris McCarrell) to get home, scolding him for making her worry and checking in on her bookworm of a daughter (Caroline Murrah), who is sucking down Red Bull and studying calculus, physics, history and the imagery in "Flowers for Algernon" all at the same time.

Diana also manages to squeeze in a round of sex with her "boring" husband, the stalwart Dan (Scott Plate), then sets about preparing her family's lunch.

She covers the table with slices of bread, then, running out of space, she moves to the floor, laying out piece after piece after piece, a clear sign that more than one of her circuits has shorted out. Soon we learn that Mama's been popping little helpers for 16 years in an attempt to control her bipolar disorder.

In a scene that follows, Diana engages in a sort of seated dirty dance with her Doctor Feelgood (cute Phil Carroll). As she trills a song titled "My Psychopharmacologist and I," he twirls her in an office swivel chair, pushing, pulling, moving her across the floor like the Patrick Swayze of M.D.'s.

(The lyrics by Brian Yorkey are as irreverent and addictive as the substances Diana ingests: "Zoloft and Paxil and Buspar and Xanax . . . Depakote, Klonopin, Ambien, Prozac . . . Ativan calms me when I see the bills -- these are a few of my favorite pills.")

It's a funny, freaky little bit of hallucinatory ballroom from director Victoria Bussert, head of the music theater program at Baldwin Wallace University, one of many small, canny touches in this moving -- and fast-moving -- production.

As with last season's lauded "Spring Awakening," her first collaboration with the Beck, the cast is filled with BW talent. Plate, heartbreaking here as the long-suffering Dan, is chairman of the department, and DeBoer, who allows a tremulous vulnerability to shimmer beneath Diana's jaded shell, is an alum.

But two of Bussert's current students deliver the most unforgettable performances. Murrah, in her first year at BW, brings grit and innocence to the part of Natalie, Diana's tragically neglected daughter. Her cheeks blaze red, both with shame at the advances of Henry, her sweet stoner of a classmate (BW freshman Ellis Dawson, exuding an affecting genuineness that older actors rarely capture) and with rage at her mother's inattention.

She has a lovely, reedy quality that belies the iron underneath, not unlike Tony nominee Elizabeth Davis, trained in the Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Play House MFA Acting Program and one of the stars of Broadway's "Once."

As her brother, Gabe -- the child Diana not so secretly and toxically favors -- McCarrell is simply mesmerizing, a word used hyperbolically by too many critics but, in this case, more than apt.

In his signature, show-stopping number "I'm Alive," the BW senior manages to channel the insatiable, selfish hunger of youth into a blast of pure vital energy. It feels as though, if hooked to a battery, he could power the world. That, in a word, is a star.

Catch a glimpse of him now in the home skies, before he shoots to Broadway.

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